Being Baboe ing Londo: exploring the life of Indonesian migrant care workers in the Netherlands

In the classical sense, discussions about growth, development, and equality have solely focused on the so-called “productive sectors”. Thus, it is not surprising that the reproductive work has been neglected and/or not considered as work. In the past, the need for social reproduction within households was fulfilled by the unpaid labour of women who were traditionally attributed such tasks. However, over the last decades, women have been encouraged to join formal sectors, not only to be independent, but also to boost national economies. But the trend of women joining the labour market has created another problem. As the participation of women in gainful employment rises, particularly in the Global North and high-income countries, care work is at risk of being left abandoned. Even though the traditional arrangement of assigning those duties to women persists to some degree, there is an increasing trend of outsourcing care work to cheap workers from poorer regions. This suggests an emergence of a new international division of reproductive labour between people coming from different places across the globe. As many people migrate to perform care work for others, many of them delegate their own social reproduction tasks to other groups. Apart from that, migrant care workers (hereafter MCWs) themselves also face opportunities and challenges in their destination country and workplaces, primarily due to their race/ethnicity, gender, class, immigration status, and category of work. This paper, thus, aims to provide theoretically informed exploration on the experiences of Indonesian MCWs in The Netherlands, particularly in The Hague. Since there are few studies on the topic in Dutch context, my paper intends to present a general overview as well as snapshots of certain aspects of the life of those workers who belong to different categories (i.e., undocumented migrants, au pairs, and caregiver/nurses), in the light of intersectionality as micro-level analysis, and division of reproductive labour and care chains as macro-level framework. The case study of Indonesian MCWs in The Netherlands has been chosen based on the fact that Indonesia has become a ‘labour brokerage state’ which sends a significant number of care workers worldwide. While many studies have focused on Indonesian migrants in major destination countries in East and West Asia, few have analysed them in the European context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this research found that the interplay of multiple identities has often reinforced the subordinate position of Indonesian MCWs within inequal structural relationships imposed by division of reproductive labour. In addition, this study also discusses how Indonesian MCWs are incorporated into global care chains and how it reduces the essence of care to only material provision.